How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?
I'm a tech interested guy. I've touched SQL once or twice, but wasn't able to really make sense of it. That combined with not having a practical use leaves SQL as largely a black box in my mind (though I am somewhat familiar with technical concepts in databasing).
With that, I keep seeing [pic related] as proof that Elon Musk doesn't understand SQL.
Can someone give me a technical explanation for how one would come to that conclusion? I'd love if you could pass technical documentation for that.
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The statement "this [guy] thinks the government uses SQL" demonstrates a complete and total lack of knowledge as to what SQL even is. Every government on the planet makes extensive and well documented use of it.
The initial statement I believe is down to a combination of the above and also the lack of domain knowledge around social security. The primary key on the social security table would be a composite key of both the SSN and a date of birth—duplicates are expected of just parts of the key.
If he knew the domain, he would know this isn't an issue. If he knew the technology he would be able to see the constraint and following investigation, reach the conclusion that it's not an issue.
The man continues to be a malignant moron
Since SSNs are never reused, what would be the purpose of using the SSN and birth date together as part of the primary key? I guess it is the one thing that isn't supposed to ever change (barring a clerical error) so I could see that as a good second piece of information, just not sure what it would be adding.
Note: if duplicate SSNs are accidentally issued my understanding is that they issue a new one to one of the people and I don't know how to find the start of the thread on twitter since I only use it when I accidentally click on a link to it.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
Take this with a grain of salt as I'm not a dev, but do work on CMS reporting for a health information tech company. Depending on how the database is designed an SSN could appear in multiple tables.
In my experience reduplication happens as part of generating a report so that all relevant data related to a key and scope of the report can be gathered from the various tables.
A given SSN appearing in multiple tables actually makes sense. To someone not familiar with SQL (i.e. at about my level of understanding), I could see that being misinterpreted as having multiple SSN repeated "in the database".
Of all the comments ao far, I find yours the most compelling.
Theoretically, yeah, that's one solution. The more reasonable thing to do would be to use the foreign key though. So, for example:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Other_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Other info
When you want to connect them to have both sets of info, it'd be the following:
SELECT * FROM SSN_Table JOIN Other_Table ON SSN_Table.ID = Other_Table.SSN_ID
EDIT: Oh, just to clear up any confusion, the SSN_ID in this simple example is not the SSN itself. To access that in this example query, it'd by SSN_Table.SSN
This is true, but there are many instances where denormalization makes sense and is frequently used.
A common example is a table that is frequently read. Instead of going to the "central" table the data is denormalized for faster access. This is completely standard practice for every large system.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it can be easily misused. With SSN, I'd think the most stupid thing to do is to use it as the primary key. The second one would be to ignore the security risks that are ingrained in an SSN. The federal government, being large as it is, I'm sure has instances of both, however since Musky is using his possy of young, arrogant brogrammers, I'm positively certain they're completely ignoring the security aspect.
To be a bit more generic here, when you're at government scale you're generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.
E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we'd have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.
Yeah, no one appreciates security.
I probably overused that saying to explain it: 'if theres no break ins, why do we pay for security? Oh, there was a break in - what do we even pay security for?'
Yeah, I work daily with a database with a very important non-ID field that is denormalized throughout most of the database. It's not a common design pattern, but it is done from time to time.
Yeah, databases are complicated and make my head hurt. Glancing through resources from other comments, I'm realizing I know next to nothing about database optimization. Like, my gut reaction to your comment is that it seems like unnecessary overhead to have that data across two tables - but if one sub-dept didn't need access to the raw SSN, but did need access to less personal data, j could see those stored in separate tables.
But anyway, you're helping clear things up for me. I really appreciate the pseudo code level example.
It's necessary to split it out into different tables if you have a one-to-many relationship. Let's say you have a list of driver licenses the person has had over the years, for example. Then you'd need the second table. So something like this:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Driver_License_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Issue_Date | Expiry_Date | Other_Info
Then you could do something like pull up a person's latest driver's license, or list all the ones they had, or pull up the SSN associated with that license.
I think a likely scenario would be for name changes, such as taking your partner's surname after marriage.
The SSN is likely to appear in multiple tables, because they will reference a central table that ties it all together. This central table will likely only contain the SSN, the birth date (from what others have been saying), as well as potentially first and last name. In this table, the entries have to be unique.
But then you might have another table, like a table listing all the physical exams, which has the SSN to be able to link it to the person's name, but ultimately just adds more information to this one person. It does not duplicate the SSN in a way that would be bad.
It is common for long lived databases with a rotating cast of devs to use different formats in different tables as well! One might have it as a string, one might have it as a number, and the other might have it with hyphens in the same database.
Hell, I work in a state agency and one of our older databases has a dozen tables with databases.
The main reason for the discrepancy is not looking at what was used before or not understanding that they can always change the formatting when displayed so they don't need to include the parenthesis or hyphens in the database itself.
Okay but if that happens, musk is right that that's a bit of a denormalization issue that mayne needs resolving.
SSNs should be stored as strings without any hyphen or additional markup, nothing else.
It's more likely though it's just a composite key...
This is not what he is actively doing though. He isn't trying to improve databases.
He is tearing down entire departments and agencies and using shit like this to justify it.
Sure but my point is, if it was the scenario you described, then Elon would be talking about the right kind of denormalization problem.
Denormalization due to multiple different tables storing their own copies of the same data, in different formats worse yet, would actually be the kind of problem he's tweeting about.
As opposed to a composite key on one table which means him being an ultracrepidarian, as usual.
Musk canceled the support for the long running Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) which is an initiative to promote better database standards and normalization for the states to address this kind of thing.
It does not fucking matter if he is technically correct about one tiny detail because he is only using to to destroy, not to improve efficiency.
Beat me to asking this follow up, though you linking additional resources is probably more effort that I would have done. Thanks for that!
My guess would be around your note. If someone mistakenly has two SSNs (due to fraud, error, or name changes), combining DOB helps detect inconsistencies.
Some other possibilities, and I'm just throwing out ideas at this point:
The sheer size of the federal government and its age would mean there are thousands of databases out there. Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
That alone makes his comment come from a place of ignorance. Of course it's confident ignorance. The worst kind.
Definitely "Confidently Incorrect" material.
I don't follow. Wouldn't that lend credence to his assertion that it's incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?
People here are being irrationally obtuse about the possibility that an agency that's existed since the 1930s may keep business-critical records on legacy systems predating relational databases. Systems serving a national agency may not migrate databases frequently.
What's he's arguing is that the government doesn't use SQL at all.
Were those his exact words? When words are ambiguous, are we selecting interpretations that serve best in the contention? Does the context suggest something obvious was left unstated? Yours seems like a forced interpretation.
Always, sometimes, here? In typical Twitter fashion, it's brief and leaves room for interpretation.
In context, always or here makes the most sense as in "This dumbass thinks the government always uses SQL." or "This dumbass thinks the government uses SQL here." Does it matter some other database is SQL if this one isn't? No. With your interpretation, he pointlessly claims that it does matter for no better reason than to discredit himself. With narrower interpretations, he doesn't. In a contention, people don't typically make pointless claims to discredit themselves. Therefore, narrower interpretations make more sense. Use context.
All I did here was apply textbook guidelines for analyzing arguments & strawman fallacies as explained in The Power of Logic. I welcome everyone to do the same.
A problem with objecting to a proposition that misrepresents the original proposition is that the objector fails to engage with the actual argument. Instead, they argue with themselves & their illusions, which looks foolish & isn't a valid argument. That's why strawman is a fallacy.
The fact is there's very little information here. We don't know which database he's referring to exactly. We don't know its technology. Some of us have worked enough with local government & legacy enterprise systems to know that following any sort of common industry standards is an unsafe assumption. No one here has introduced concrete information on any of that to draw clear conclusions, though there's an awful lot of conjecture & overreading.
He seemed to use the word de-duplicated incorrectly. However, he also explained exactly what he meant by that, so the word hardly matters. Is there a good chance he's wrong that multiple records with the same SSN indicate fraud? Without a clear explanation of the data architecture, I think so.
I despise idiocy. Therefore, I despise what Musk is doing to the government. Therefore, I despise it when everyone else does it.
Seeing this post keep popping up in the lemmy feed is annoying when it's clear from context that there's nothing there but people reading more into it.
We don't have to become idiots to denounce idiocy.
That is all you need. He's not saying "This retard thinks the SSA uses SQL". He is saying "the government" which means all of it. Saying someone is a retard because they think the government uses SQL means Elon doesn't think they do because we all know he doesn't consider himself a retard.
You are looking for ambiguity where there is none.
Nah, that's ignoring context irrationally. Context matters. I'll show.
Can SSA not be called “the government”?
So, let's try your suggested interpretation.
That seems to agree with mine.
However, you denied ambiguity of language, and that context matters, so let's explore that: which government? The Brazilian government? Your state government? Your local government? No? How do you know? That's right: context.
Why stop there? There's more context: a Social Security database was specifically mentioned.
Does “the government” always mean all of it? When a federal agent knocks someone's door & someone gripes "The goddamn government is after me!" do they literally mean the entire government? I know from context I or anyone else can informally refer to any part of the government at any level as "the government". I think you know this.
Likewise, when people refer to the ocean or the sky or the people, they don't necessarily mean all of it or all of them.
Another way to check meaning is to test whether a proposition still makes sense when something obvious unstated is explicitly written out.
Still make sense? Yes. Could that be understood from context without explicitly writing it out? Yes.
A refrain:
Lol talk about burying the lede... The issue here is that the government absolutely uses SQL to traverse a DB and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
Naw, I definitely meant to be asking about duplication of data in databases (vs if the government actually uses SQL).
Sorry to have communicated that so poorly. Everyone seems to be taking the angle you're arguing though. Guess I'll need to work on that.
The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
The SSN is 9 digits long; so technically they would have to start re-using them after the billionth one. Given the current population size, and how many people have been born/died since its implementation - it’s fair to say they haven’t had to re-use any figures yet.
The number is structured though. Some positions represent things like the geographic region you were born in, others relate to the year you were born. That drastically cuts down the available numbers as the entire range isn't available in all situations.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html
Not to mention, anyone who has worked in the US gets a SSN, not just citizens or current residents.
I know a bunch of people over here in europe who have them after working a few months/ years in the US.
Right. Fingers crossed we figure out national IDs before then.
Papers please
They have several generations to go. Literally not a problem for us or our grandchildren.
Elon Musk’s degree is in economics. He might be a script kiddie.
But I was assured he was a materials engineer, rocket scientist, computer programmer, and businessman extraordinaire!
Elin musk is a (criminal) scammer, he always has been.
He was fired for incompetence from his own company
Pretty much everything he's promised for every company he has headed had been a lie. Tesla full self driving? Lie. Hyperloop? All lies to successful kill high speed rail and start a movement that wasted billions of dollars including tax payer money. Even SpaceX, the least shit of all, is shit. Once you really look at it, its all promises with no results and lots of cheering when millions of tax payer dollars -yet again- blow up in the sky.
The guy has one quality: convincing people that he's smart even though he literally doesn't know shit
I'm not arguing that Elon musk is anything but an absolute tool.
SS numbers have 999 million options. Are we already repeating them?
We have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.
Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.
I don't think we've gone through 999 million options yet. Only about 350 million people have been born since 1933, so even if we add all 127 million US citizens alive in 1935, that's just over half of the possible social security numbers.
The reason we've likely reused numbers is because they weren't randomly assigned until like 2011. Knowing that I was born in 1995 in Wichita, KS, you could make an educated guess at the first three digits of my SSN
We have 335 million people in this country literally right now. I don't think "350 million born since 1933" makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
Edit: number fixin
Not every person in the United States was born in the United States and even temporary workers can get a SSN
I mean you can check my math, I just added up all the births per year in this article
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/06/12/how-many-people-were-born-the-year-you-were-born/111928356/
Rounding to one significant figure, it's 311.9 million people born in the US between 1933 and 2018. Adding an average of 4 million births per year since then, it's 335.9. I rounded up to 350 to bring it to a nice round number
A bit of research tells me that around 44.8 million of us are first generation immigrants, so 291.1 million were born here. Is it reasonable to assume that 291.1 out of the 335.9 million people born since 1933 have survived so far? I have absolutely no idea, I'm not a professional census taker
Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Said this elsewhere, but wanted to be sure you had the chance to see the linked material. The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
Just read that, and it says they've only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would've been a lot more than that.
I don't want to come off as a bot spamming this in a bunch of different comment threads, but The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
Wait, SSNs weren't designed to be GUIDs? I mean, I fully follow that they aren't and we've had to reuse them when the circle of life does its thing, but I thought they were just designed poorly and we found out the hard eay they don't work as GUIDs. What purpose were they designed for if not to act as GUIDs?
They were designed to be only used for the administration of social security. Since they were sending monthly checks, they needed a way to know that the person going to the office and saying their address changed was who they said they were. This was at a time before driver's licences were common and they didn't have any other type of ID, and there were just a lot fewer people.
Later on the SSN started to be used by banks and other entities even though it was never meant for that, and the risks associated with the relatively insecure design just compounded, because instead of just fraudulently claiming someone else's social security checks (which, unless the target died, would probably be figured out within a month), it opened up all sorts of extra avenues for fraud.
Also he doesnt know what an SCD is.
Because SQL is everywhere. If Musk knew what it was, he would know that the government absolutely does use it.
This explanation makes no sense in the context of OP’s question, given the order of comments..
Yeah, a better explanation is that Deduplicating Databases are an absolutely terrible idea for every use case, as it means deleting history from the database.
"The government" is multiple agencies and departments. There is no single computer system, database, mainframe, or file store that the entire US goverment uses. There is no standard programming language used. There is no standard server configuration. Each agency is different. Each software project is different.
When someone says the government doesn't use sql, they don't know what they are talking about. It could be refering to the fact that many government systems are ancient mainframe applications that store everything in vsam. But it is patently false that the government doesn't use sql. I've been on a number of government contracts over the years, spanning multiple agencies. MsSQL was used in all but one.
Furthermore, some people share SSNs, they are not unique. It's a common misconception that they are, but anyone working on a government software learns this pretty quickly. The fact that it seems to be a big shock goes to show that he doesn't know what he is doing and neither do the people reporting to him.
Not only is he failing to understand the technology, he is failing to understand the underlying data he is looking at.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the Vice Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
I'm not aware of any instance where two people share an SSN though. The Social Security Administration even goes as far as to say they don't recycle the SSNs of dead people (its linked a couple times in other comments and Voyager doesn't let me save drafts of comments, I'll make an edit to this comment with that link for you).
Can you point me to somewhere showing multiple people can share an SSN?
Edit: as promised: The Social Security FAQ page
Assuming the whole "duplicate SSN" thing isn't just a complete fabrication, we have no idea what table he was even looking at! A table of transactions e.g. would have a huge number of duplicate SSNs.
The fact that SSN aren't singular identifiers has been public knowledge for quite a while. ID analytics has shown in over a decade of studies that some people have multiple SSN attached to their name, while some (over five million) SSN are used by three or more living individuals. If you search "ID analytics SSN" you'll find loads of articles reporting on this dating back to 2010 and a bit before.
Was trying to find something from the SSA itself on the topic, but didn't turn anything useful up on the quick.
Here is a link for the lazy on the topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6C10406347
I mean I don't know a ton about SQL but one thing to keep in mind about SSNs is they were not originally meant to be used for identification but because we have no form of national id and places still needed a way to verify who you are people just started using SSNs for that since it's something everyone has and there wasn't really a better option. So now the government has been having to try and make them work for that and make them more secure. The better solution would be to make some form of national id that is designed to be secure but Republicans and people like Musk would probably call that government overreach or a way to spy and track people.
Ugh, YES, I am so frustrated at the counter arguments for this that I constantly hear spouted by my (ultra-conservative) family.
I hope that notion re-enters the public consciousness as a part of this (not holding my breath tho)
My wife has a tax payment history under two different legal names which share a single SSN
Hmmm, well I can't speak to how the actual databases are put together, so maybe they would have that as two separate unique primary keys with a duplicated SSN.
But it really seems like bad design if they out it together that way....
Worth noting is that "good" database design evolved over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). If anything was setup pre-1970s, they wouldn't have even had the conception of the normal forms used to cut down on data duplication. And even after they were defined, it would have been quite a while before the concepts trickled down from acedmemia to the engineers actually setting up the databases in production.
On top of that, name to SSN is a many-to-many relationship - a single person can legally change their name, and may have to apply for a new SSN (e.g. in the case of identity theft). So even in a well normalized database, when you query the data in a "useful" form (e.g. results include name and SSN), it's probably going to appear as if there are multiple people using the same SSN, as well as multiple SSNs assigned to the same person.
This is from 15 years ago, so I don't know how much has changed since then. But this sounds like the sort of thing they mean.
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6c10406347
In responding to other comments, I've found similar things.
All the same, thanks for the resources!
I'd imagine the numbers of dead people eventually get cycled around to. 9 digits only gives you 999,999,999 people to go through, and we have over a third of that in existence right now.
FTFY
Why would one person, one SSN ever have two different birth dates? That sounds like an issue all onto itself.
I think what he means is that the unique identifier for a database record is a composite of two fields: SSN + birth date. That doesn’t mean that SSN to birth date is a one-to-many relation.
But they are implying SSN to SSN+Birthdate is a one-to-many relationship. Since SSN to SSN should be one-to-one, you can conclude the SSN to Birthdate is one-to-many, right?
I think I was getting some wires crossed and/or misunderstood what geoff (parent commentor to my last comment) was saying, so my comment may be misdirected some.
But according to The Social Security FAQ page, SSNs are not recycled, so that data (especially when compounded and hashed with other data) should be able to establish a one-to-one relationship between each primary key and an SSN, thusly having SSNs appear associated with multiple primary keys is a concern.
Other comments have pointed to other explanations for why SSNs could appear to occur multiple times, but those amount to "it appeared in a different field associated with the same primary key". I think thats the most likely explanation of things.
Note that it being only part of a key is a technology choice that does not require the reality map to it. It may seem like overkill, but someone may not trust the political process to preserve that promise and so they add the birthdate, just in case something goes sideway in the future. Lots of technical choices are made anticipating likely changes and problems and designing things to be extra robust in the face of those
A weak example would be my grandma. She was born before social security and was told as a kid she was born in 1938. Because I guess in the olden days, you just didn't need to pass your birth certificate around for anything, it wasn't until she went to get married at ~age 25 that she needed her birth certificate and when she got it, it actually said she was born in 1940 (I forget the actual years, but I remember it was a two year and two day gap between dates).
Its a weak example that should apply to only a microscopic portion of the population, but I could see her having some weird records in the databases as a result.
Edit: brain dropped out and I forgot part of a sentence.
As a data engineer for the past 20+ years: There is absolutely no fucking way that the us gov doesnt use sql. This is what shows that he’s stupid not only in sql but in data science in general.
Regarding duplications: its more nuanced than those statements each side put. There can be duplications in certain situations. In some situations there shouldnt be. And I dont really see how duplications in a db is open to fraud.
Well we heard what the Whitehouse press secretary has to say about the fraud they found 2 days ago. They found massive amounts and she brought receipts! All of them were examples of money being spent that disagree with Trump's new policies. Like money spent on DEI initiatives and aid sent to countries in Africa to help slow the spread of HIV. That receipt was for a laughable $57,000.
Then when asked how any of it was fraud she said, well they consider that fraud because it wasn't used to help Americans.
So the 27 year old married to a billionaire 32 years older than her is complaining that the money wasnt directly spent on her gold digging ass, and if it's not spent directly on her, it's fraud.
Biggest disgrace of a government that has ever existed.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
If it's used as an identifier to link together rows from different tables. Also known as "joining" tables. SSN (with birthdate) is a unique identifier, and so it's natural to choose as a primary/foreign key.
It really is baffling trying to make sense of what he is saying. It's like the only explanation that makes any sense at all is that he has no idea what he is talking about. Even if he knew just cursory knowledge about database cardinality you wouldn't say stuff so stupid.
Oh yeah? How about SCD? I bet all ssn are in an SCD.
It doesn't matter without scope. Are we looking at a database of SSNs? tax records? A sign in log? The social security number database might require uniques in some way, but tax records could be the same person over multiple years. A sign in gives a unique identifier but you could be signing in every day.
It's like saying a car VIN shows up multiple times in a database. Where? What database? Was it sold? Tickets? Registered every year?
This is nothing more than a "assume I mean immigrants or tax fraud and get mad!" inflammatory statement with no proof or reason.
Because of course the government uses SQL. It's as stupid as saying the government doesn't use electricity or something equally stupid. The government is myriad agencies running myriad programs on myriad hardware with myriad people. My damned computers at home are using at least 2-3 SQL databases for some of the programs I run.
SQL is damn near everywhere where data sets are found.
Aha Airforce one likely uses SQL
AF1 probably needs a database just for it's in in-flight menu.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
SSNs being duplicated would be entirely expected depending upon the table's purpose. There are many forms of normalization in database tables.
I mean just think about this a little bit, if the purpose is transactions or something and each row has a SSN reference in it for some reason, you'd have a duplicate SSN per transaction row.
A tiny bit of learning SQL and you could easily see transactional totals grouped by SSN (using, get this, a group by clause). This shit is all 100% normal depending upon the normalization level of the schema. There are even -- almost obviously -- tradeoffs between fully normalizing data and being able to access it quickly. If I centralize the identities together and then always only put the reference id in a transactional table, every query that needs that information has to go join to it and the table can quickly become a dependency knot.
There was a "member" table for instance in an IBM WebSphere schema that used to cause all kinds of problems, because every single record was technically a "member" so everything in the whole system had to join to it to do anything useful.
I don't think I get what this means. As you describe it, that reference id sounds comparable to a pointer, and so there should be a quick look up when you need to de-reference it, but that hardly seems like a "dependency knot"?
I feel like this is showing my own ignorance on the back end if databasing. Can you point me to references that explain this better?
I'm talking about a SQL join. It's essentially combining two tables into one set of query results and there are a number of different ways to do it.
https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp
Some joins are fast and some can be slow. It depends on a variety of different factors. But making every query require multiple joins to produce anything of use is usually pretty disastrous in real-life scenarios. That's why one of the basics of schema design is that you usually normalize to what's called third normal form for transactional tables, but reporting schemas are often even less normalized because that allows you to quickly put together reporting queries that don't immediately run the database into the ground.
DB normalization and normal forms are practically a known science, but practitioners (and sometimes DBAs) often have no clue that this stuff is relatively settled and sometimes even use a completely wrong normal form for what they are doing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
In most software (setting aside well-written open source), the schema was put together by someone who didn't even understand what normal form they were targeting or why they would target it. So the schema for one application will often be at varying forms of normalization, and schemas across different applications almost necessarily will have different normal forms within them even if they're properly designed.
All that said, detecting, grouping, comparing, and removing duplicates is a basic function of SQL. It's definitely not expected that, for instance, database tables would never contain a duplicate reference to a SSN. Leon is indeed demonstrating here that he's a complete idiot when it comes to databases. (And he goes a step further by saying the government doesn't use SQL when it obviously does somewhere. SQL databases are so ubiquitous that just about any modern software package contains one.)
Oh, well another user pointed out that SSN's are not unique, I think they are recycled after death or something. In any case, I do know that when the SSN system was first created it was created by people who said this is NOT MEANT to be treated as unique identifiers for our populace, and if it were it would be more comprehensive than an unsecure string of numbers that anyone can get their hands on. But lo and behold, we never created a proper solution and we ended up using SSN's for identity purposes. Poop.
I'm pretty sure there is a federal statute that says ONLY the SSA may collect or use SSNs, as to federal agencies. I argued it once when a federal agency court tried to tell me that it couldn't process part of my client's case without it. I didn't care but my client was crotchety and would only even give me the last four.
Edit. It's a regulation:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/802.23
An agency cannot require disclosure of an SSN for any right or benefit unless a specific federal statute requires it or the agency required the disclosure prior to 1975.
In my case the agency got back to me with some federal statute that didn't say what they said it said, and eventually they had to admit they were wrong.
It's entirely possible that the database is pre SQL.
He didn't say the SSN database isn't SQL. He said the GOVERNMENT doesn't use SQL.
Musk's statement about the government not using SQL is false. I worked for FEMA for fourteen years, a decade of which was as a Reports Analyst. I wrote Oracle SQL+ code to pull data from a database and put it into spreadsheets. I know, I know. You're shocked that Elon Musk is wrong. Please remain calm.
I work for a crown corp in Canada we have, off the top of my head, about 800 MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres databases across the org (I manage our CMDB). Musk is a retard. The world runs on SQL.
He wouldn't know this though because he's a techbro that builds apps with MongoDB b cause he doesn't understand what normalizing data is and why SQL is the best option for 99.9999999% of applications.
Fucking idiots.
As a former DOD contractor I can also confirm we built whole platforms that use Oracle (shudder) SQL
Elmo Susk surely thinks they store everything on excel.
Pandas and Pickle man….
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
100%
What's fascinating is you can take pretty much ANY topic, beside scamming at scale because there he truly is a master, you have some knowledge about and see very fast that he has no fucking clue. From engineering to video game, the guy has no idea. Sure his entourage, paid or not, might actually be World expert about said topic, but not him. So obvious.
Its because the comments he made are inconsistent with common conventions in data engineering.
Basically what he said is
incoherentinconsistent with typical practices among data engineersto anybody who has worked with larger data.In terms of using SQL, it's basically just a more reliable and better Excel that doesn't come with a default GUI.
If you need to store data, It's almost always best throw it into a SQLite database Because it keeps it structured. It's standardised and it can be used from any programming language.
However, many people use excel because they don't have experience with programming languages.
Get chatGpt to help you write a PyQT GUI for a SQLite database and I think you would develop a high level understanding for how the pieces fit together
Edit: @zalgotext made a good point.
Great explanation, but I have a tiny, tiny, minor nit-pick
I'm being pedantic, but I disagree with your wording. As a backend dev, I work with relational databases a ton, and what Musk said wasn't incomprehensible to me, it just sounded like something a first year engineer fresh out of college would say.
Again, the rest of your explanation is spot on, absolutely no notes, but I do think the distinction between "adult making up incomprehensible bullshit" and "adult cosplaying as a baby engineer who thinks he's hot shit but doesn't know anything beyond surface level stuff" is important.
Fair point, I've edited the answer to be clearer for future readers.
That's a bad example to reference. The ZFS implementation of deduplication is poorly thought out, and I say that even though I like and run ZFS on my own Linux server(s). I understand that the BTRFS implementation of dedupe works well (no first-hand experience), and the Windows one works great (first-hand experience).
I've had a poor experience with btrfs dedupe tbh (and a terrible experience with qgroups), however, this was years ago. Btrfs snapshots I prefer though, much easier not to have that dependence.
What distro are you using for ZFS, void?
Good to know, thanks. I haven't worked with btrfs much yet. I have ZFS on a Debian server.
It was a great answer until the very last sentence. ChatGPT is never a reference for anything ever if you have any fraction of a brain.
I have a fraction of a brain, I think, and use ChatGPT as a guide so that I have something to start with. Even if it's slightly off, my two brain cells can pick it out and go from there. It's not so bad.
And you know, I get it if you don't like AI, but let's be honest about it at the very least.
To be honest it's a shit solution that makes you worse by merely using it.
I mostly ask it things I don't know, though. I'm not exporting my thinking to it.
I ask it difficult translations, how to code something I'm unfamiliar with, help with grammar, i use it as an OCR for other languages, to help me remember things I can't directly search, etc. I have a hard time believing all use is detrimental, especially when you're filling in the gaps of your knowledge and a best guess will do. It's surely better than a web search for things you don't even know how to write in a search box.
You sound like common sense and the other person sounds like they have an axe to grind.
Exhibit A
Which are then obviously confirmed with a web search. Jesus, spare me the cynicism.
And I'm just going to say this as a general observation, but the user base of the fediverse is pretty sophisticated at this time to be assuming shit like this. You make this place hostile by not giving the benefit of the doubt, you know. And even then. How hard is it to not think the worst of everyone you come across online? So ridiculous and petty.
I disagree, it's just a tool. It's a fantastic way to template applications very quickly, particularly for those who are not already familiar with technologies and may not have the time or opportunity to play around with things otherwise.
Llm is not a search engine and it can produce awful code. This is not production code, it's for tinkering. As a sandbox tool, LLMs are fantastic.
On the ethical side of things, yeah openAI sucks, Qwen2.5 would be up to this task, one can run that locally.
It's a disinformation machine which completely lacks all context. If it's about 85% accurate to average internet denizens and 15% halucination, then it's an absolutely atrocious source to learn from. You're literally lying to yourself, that is what the tool does.
Well Ive ad a great time using LLMs to sandbox a dozen implementations and then investigate the shortcoming and advantages of different implementations.
Mistakes happen a lot but they can be managed on a small MWE with a couple of tests.
It's how the tool is used more than any given tool being bad.
I understand your point and you're not wrong. However, I'm not wrong either and you should take a second look at how you might use these tools in a way that makes your life easier and addresses the valid limitations you've described.
To oversimplify, there are two basic kinds of databases: SQL (Structured Query Language, usually pronounced like "sequel" or spelled aloud) and noSQL ("Not Only SQL").
SQL databases work as you'd imagine, with tables of rows and columns like a spreadsheet that are structured according to a fixed schema.
NoSQL includes all other forms of databases, document-based, graph-based, key-value pairs, etc.
The former are highly consistent and efficient at processing complicated queries or recording transactions, while the latter are more flexible and can be very fast at reads/writes but are harder to keep in sync as a result.
All large orgs will have both types in use for different purposes; SQL is better for banking needs where provable consistency is paramount, NoSQL better for real-time web apps and big data processing that need minimal response times and scalable capacity.
That Musk would claim the government doesn't use SQL immediately betrays him as someone who is entirely unfamiliar with database administration, because SQL is everywhere.
Just so I'm clear, you're implying that a given SSN could appear associated to multiple "keys" because the key-value pair in a NoSQL database could have complex data.
An example I can imagine is a widow collecting her dead husband's Social Security. Her SSN could appear in her own entry and also in her dead husband's as a payee of that benefit, thus appearing as a "duplicate" SSN.
Is that in line with what you're saying?
Indeed, that's a possibility, but I'm not privy to the structure of the social security administration's databases so I couldn't say if it was indeed the case.
The deeper point being, if the government has any databases at all, then some form of Structured Query Language is being used to read and write it.
Thats how I feel too.
Lol, I'd love to see the data hes trying to speak about (not that that'd be any kind of concerning for privacy /s). I don't think he's outright lying, but it definitely feels like a misrepresentation / wrong conclusion from the data.
But thanks for your part in helping me understand all this!
I didn't read it like that. What I take from it is that he's implying that the government uses something much stupider than sql, like Lotus1-2-3 or plain txt files or excel. I really wouldn't be surprised that there's some government department that had their IT done during the first Bush administration and didn't really upgrade from it since.
There are also probably some departments that don't get much funding, so they organise part of their work into some shared excel files.l
Nothing really wrong with that. Unless he's implying that the entire federal government works like that, which is preposterously stupid.
Seems to me that the most generous interpretation would be the preponderance of Oracle's DBs in the government, and Musk being pedantic since they aren't literally called "SQL" like MySQL, MSSQL, or PostgreSQL (even though most Oracle DBs still fall into that category).
There can be duplicate SSNs due to name changes of an individual, that's the easiest answer. In general, it's common to just add a new record in cases where a person's information changes so you can retain the old record(s) and thus have a history for a person (look up Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)). That's how the SSA is able to figure out if a person changed their gender, they just look up that information using the same SSN and see if the gender in the new application is different from the old data.
Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs. The best explanation I have for that is that various state departments have their own on-premise databases and their own structure and design that do not necessarily mirror the federal master database. There are likely some databases where the SSN field is setup to accept strings only, since in real life, your SSN on your card actually has dashes, those dashes make the number into a string. If the SSN is stored as a string in a state database, then when it's brought over to the federal database (assuming the federal db is using a number field instead of text), there can be some data loss, resulting in a NULL.
JFC: married individuals, or divorced and name change back, would be totally fucked. Just on the very surface is his fuckery.
Hypothetically you could have a separate "previous names" table where you keep the previous names and on the main table you only keep the current name. There are a lot of ways to design a db to not unnecessarily duplicate SSNs, but without knowing the implementation it's hard to say how wrong Musk is. But it's obvious he doesn't know what he's talking about because we know that due to human error SSN-s are not unique and you can't enforce uniqueness on SSN-s without completely fucking up the system. Complaining about it the way he did indicates that he doesn't really understand why things are the way they are.
A much simpler answer is thatnot all Americans actually have an SSN. The Amish for example have religious objections towards insurance, so they were allowed to opt out from social security and therefore don't get an SSN.It's true that some Americans don't have Social Security numbers, but those Americans can't collect Social Security benefits unless/until they get one.
My bad, I thought it was about payments in general (including other programs) but it says social security database. Sorry.
How come republicans keep saying that doggy is going to expose all the fraud in the government but yet the biggest fraud with 37 felonies is president? What the actual fuck to these people think?
Because those are all false charges according to them.
He is saying the US government doesn't use structured databases.
At least 90% of all databases have a structure.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
As someone explained in another comment, you often duplicate information due to rules around cardinality to gain improvements in retrieval an. structure. I would be pretty worried if SSSNs were being used as a a widepread primary key in any set of tables - those should generally be UUIDs that can be optimized for gashing while avoiding collisions.
Even if we are being generous to Elon, we could assume that social security payments are processed on mainframes given how many have to go out and the legacy nature of the program. Most mainframe shops I know have adapted an SQL interface for records in some capacity, but who knows what he is looking at.
Government federal IT is done at a per agency basis. I would say oracle database is pretty much the most licensed piece of software the government does use outside of Redhat Linux and windows desktop.
I think a lot of comments here miss the mark, it's not really just about stating the gov does not use SQL or speculation regarding keys.
Deduplication is generally part of a compression strategy and has nothing to do with SQL. If we're being generous he may have been talking about normalization, but no one I have ever met has confused the two terms (they are distinctly different from an engineering perspective).
There are degrees of normalization too, so it may make total sense to normalize 3NF (third normal form) rather than say 6NF depending on the data.
Thats interesting. I didn't know anything about normal forms, but a quick glance at G4G has some interesting information. I don't have the time to go through their full article at the moment, but its been added to my to do list.
Link for the lazy: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/types-of-normal-forms-in-dbms/
This is it, relational databases are normalized under forms, deduplicate is usually a term used when talking about a concrete data set from data sources like a database, not the relational data model in the database itself.
Everything they don't understand (which is nearly everything) is either God or fraud. Do with that information what you will.
Well, here it's Cake or Death! Choose carefully.
It's an insanely idiotic thing to say. Federal government IT is myriad, and done at a per agency level. Any relational database system, which the federal government uses plenty of, uses SQL in one way or another. Elon doesn't know what he is talking about at all, and is being an ultimate idiot about this. Even in the context of mainframe projects thatif we are giving elong the benefit of doubt about referring to, most COBOL shoprbibknow have adapted to addressing internal data records using an SQL interface, although obviously in that legacy world it is insanely fractured and arcane.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
Well, if someone changes their name you'd add a new record with the same SSN to hold their new name, that way it keeps the records consistent with the paperwork; old papers say their old name and reference the retired record, new papers use their new name and reference the new record.
You can use the SSN as the key to find all records associated with a person, it doesn't have to be a single row per SSN, in fact that would make the data harder to manage and less accurate.
E.g. if someone changes their last name after getting married, it could be useful to be able to have their current and former name in the database for reference.
Another commentor pointed out a legitimate use case, but it's not even worth thinking about that much. De-duplocated is usually a word you use in data science to talk aboutakong sure your dataset is "hygienic" and that you aren't duplicating data points. A database is much different because it is less about representing data, and more about storing it in a way that allows you to perform transactions at scale - retrieval, storage, modification, etc. Relational databases are analyzed in terms of data cardinality which essentially describes tradeoffs in representation between speed of retrieval (duplications good) vs storage efficiency (duplications bad).
The issue is that Elon is so vague and so off the mark that it is very hard to believe that he even has the first clue about what he is a talking about. Even you are confused just by reading it. It is all a tactic to convince others that he is smarter than he is while doing extreme damage to the hardworking people that actually make this stuff possible. Have you noticed that the man has never come to a conclusion that wasn't in his interests? This is not honest intellectualism, or discussion based on technical merit. It's self serving propaganda.
If he doesn't think the government uses sql after having his goons break into multiple government servers he is an idiot.
If he is lying to cover his ass for fucking up so many things (the more likely explanation) then saying "he never used sql" is basically a dig at how technically inept he really is despite bragging about being a tech bro.
The ignorance of Elon is truly concerning, but somehow the worst part to me is Elon calling someone a retard for pointing that out.
Ableist, racist white supremacist doing their ableist-racist-white-supremacist thing.
He called a rescuer a pedophile for trying to rescue children...
After his own offer to rescue the children was turned down
The US government pays lots of money to Oracle to use their database. And it's not for BerkleyDB either. (Poor sleepy cat). Oracle provides them support for their relational databases... and those databases use... SQL.
Now if Musk tries to end the Oracle contracts, then Oracle's lawyers will go after his lawyers and I'm a gonna get me some popcorn. (But we all know that won't happen in any timeline... Elon gotta keep Larry happy.)
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
formally, changing the identity of someone would have a very explicit reason to keep a "duplicate" ssn entry, if purely for historical reasons for example. I'm sure there are a myriad of technical reasons to be doing this.
Because everyone hates IPv6?
Why not reuse SSN that are no longer are in service for whatever reason?
He gonna write everything in Pandas. Who the fuck needs to pay hundreds of millions a year to Oracle. (And I bet thats really how much they pay Oracle)
Also, ohh boy Oracle’s layers… those you dont wanna mess with.
If SSNs are used as a primary key (a unique identifier for a row of data) then they'd have to be duplicated to be able to merge data together.
However, even if they aren't using ssn as an identifier as it's sensitive information. It's not uncommon to repeat data either for speed/performance sake, simplicity in table design, it's in a lookup table, or you have disconnected tables.
Having a value repeated doesn't tell you anything about fraud risk, efficency, or really anything. Using it as the primary piece of evidence for a claim isn't a strong arguement.
This sounds like a reasonable argument.
Can you pass any resources with examples on when having duplicate values would be useful/best practices?
Sure, basically any time you have a many-to-many relationship you'll have to repeat keys multiple times. Think students taking courses. You'd have a students table and a courses table, but the relationship is many students take many courses. So you'd want a third table for lookups where each row is [student_id, course_id].
This stackoverflow post has a similar example with authors and books - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13970628/how-do-i-model-a-many-to-many-relation-in-sql-server#13970688
This is the answer.. it seems few on lemmy have ever normalized a database. But they do know how to give answers!
Thanks, OP seemed more curious about the technical aspects than just the absurdity of the comment (since pretty much every business uses SQL) so hoped a more technical explanation might be appreciated.
It's more than just SQL. Social Security Numbers can be re-used over time. It is not a unique identifier by itself.
i've heard conflicting reports on this, i have no idea to what degree this is true, but i would be cautious about making this statement unless you demonstrate it somehow.
As read on wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number ) the format only allows +/- 100k numbers per area code ( which is also limited to 999 codes? ), so over time you are forced to reuse some codes. In total the format allows 99m unique codes, and the us currently has 334mil people sooooo :')
evidently they must be doing something else on the backend for this to be working, assuming there are quite literally 100M numbers, which is going to be static due to math, obviously, but they clearly can't be reassigning numbers to 3 people on average at any given time, without some sort of external mechanism.
https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html
that certainly doesnt seem like it would support several generations, possibly at our current birth rate i suppose.
DDG AI bullshit tells me that there are a billion codes. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/03/10/will-we-ever-run-out-of-social-security-numbers/ this article says it's 1 billion
https://www.ssn-verify.com/how-many-ssns
this website also lists it as approximately 1 billion.
I think i see the change. They are mentioning the ssn is 9 numbers long, which is 1 longer than the 3-3-2 format wikipedia mentions. That does mean its around 999mil numbers, which ye allows for a few generations ( like, 1 or 2 lol )
yeah, that sounds about right, ok i think we've figured this one out now. lol
Having never seen the database schema myself, my read is that the SSN is used as a primary key in one table, and many other tables likely use that as a foreign key. He probably doesn't understand that foreign keys are used as links and should not be de-duplicated, as that breaks the key relationship in a relational database. As others have mentioned, even in the main table there are probably reused or updated SSNs that would then be multiple rows that have timestamps and/or Boolean flags for current/expired.
Is this is true, then by this time we are all fucked. Like Monday someone checks their banking or retirement and it all gone. That's gonna be a crazy day.
I hope they're not using the actual SSN as the primary key. I hope its a big ass number that is otherwise unrelated.
It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.
“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.
It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.
It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.
A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.
SSN is also not a valid unique key, there have been situations with multiple people issued the same SSN:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number
Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.
The main components would probably be:
There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.
Just read the format of the us ssn in that wikipedia. That wasnt a smart format to use lol. Only supports 99*999 ( +/- 100k ) people per area code. No wonder numbers are reused.
In some countries its birthday+sequence number encoded with gender+checksum and that has been working since the 80's.
Before that was a different number, but it wasnt future proof like the us ssn so we migrated away in the 80's :')
In my country the only way that someone has the same number is if someone was born on the same day (±1 century), in the same city and has the same name and family name. Is extremely difficult to have duplicates in that way (exception: immigrants, because the "city code" is the same for the whole foreign country, so it's not impossible that there are two Ananya Gupta born on the same day in the whole India)
Oh ye, our system wouldnt fit india as its limited to 500 births a day ( sequence is 3, digits and depending if its even or uneven describes your gender ). Your system seems fine to me and beats the us system hands down haha
Dedup is about saving storage and has literally nothing to do with primary keys.
It's a terminology thing really yes. I mean a database (SQL or not) shouldn't need de-duplication by nature of how the record index/keys work.
If they're not using a form of SQL though, I'd be very interested in what they are using. Back in the 90s I was messing around with things like Btrieve and other even more antiquated database engines. But all the software I used that utilised such things was converted to use a form of SQL (even if in some cases there were internal wrappers to allow access in the older way too via legacy code) over 20 years ago.
If I were an American though my biggest concern would be that Musk is able to know the structure AND content of the social security database. His post (if we believe it) demonstrates he must have access to both pieces of information.
At best he is referring to an older mainframe he is aware of not being sql while being completely oblivious of all the government systems that are in sql.
Which isn't giving him any credit, because in that case he is atill running his mouth based on being ignorant about other government systems.
I submitted data to a government database yesterday that I know for a fact is sql because we have had an ongoing years long relationship that involves improving that system and aligning our state level sql database. The government absolutely uses sql frequently, even if they still have older mainframes with some other database architecture.
This makes more sense. But even then they would surely transfer data from the old system over.
I mean I'm liking the idea that they went down into the basement, started up an old mini computer, with "superman 3" magnetic tapes with data from the 1980s to force them to try to integrate with that and only after transferring the data at 1000cps, find out it's entirely out of date.
I mean, it won't be the case, but I'd really like it to be. 😛
All you gotta do is snap your fingers!
Moving data from system to system is a massive undertaking. It probably needs to be restructured, and decisions made during the process will be found to be imperfect and adjustments will need to be made along the way.
Then you have to change all the connections to other systems and recreate the existing reports and by the way the changed structure impacts all of that and you need to revisit why you have all this stuff snd why don't we just leave it alone after all.
There is a reason that legacy systems stick around. I'm sure they have legacy mainframes with financial data. At my state office we have a financial mainframe we have been wanting to get rid of for over a decade and while we have peeled off what processes we can there is still a ton left to do. Nothing about it is easy compared to creating something new from scratch, in fact transitioning to a new system to replace an old system is probably ten times as much work. Not to mention you still have to use and maintain the old system the entire time!
I'm still learning SQL, so if I'm out of line someone please correct me, but, the gist of it, is that SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language used in pretty much all relational databases, which with something like the Social Security database is almost guaranteed. Having duplicates of information in a relational database is not a sign of fraud, or anything shady going on.
When you're born, your name, along with your SSN and any other relevant info is put into the database, later in life, say you change your name, the original name, along with your SSN will stay there, and a new line in the database would be added with your new name, along with your SSN again (a duplicate) that way the database has a reference point between old and new name, and keeps all your information lined up between the two.
If you were to get rid of all of that duplicate information, anyone who's ever had a name change, been married, etc. It will cause chaos in the database, with hundreds of millions of entries that now have no relation to anything, and are now just basically dead ends.
Rows in a SQL table have a primary key which works as the unique identifier for that row. The primary key can be as simple as an incrementing number.
Right, but if there were multiple entries with the same SSN, wouldnt that be a concern?
Not unless the data associated with that SSN is itself inconsistent.
For example, when multiple people are fraudulently using the same SSN, the fraud monitoring DB would neccessarily need to record several entries with the same SSN.
Ah the old "malware detectors have the selectors for malware and so they show up as malware to other malware detection systems" problem.
Yeah, that seems like a reasonable case to have duplicate SSNs.
To me I'm not really sure what his reply even means. I think it's some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:
Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn't use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.
Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn't use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon's ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it's really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.
Thanks for genuine response. Lol, most who interpret my question that way you did don't seem interested in a good faith discussion. But ol' boy is def tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm intending to pry at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
My guess is that he thinks SQL is an app or implementation like MS-SQL. It would be pretty surprising if the government didn't use SQL as in relational databases, but if it doesn't it's even more unlikely that he understands even the first part over whether having duplicate SS numbers is in any way unexpected or unreasonable. Most likely one of the junior devs somewhere along the lines misunderstood a query and said something uninformed and mocking, and he took that as a good dig to toss into a tweet.
it's probably using some sort of proprietary home grown database, because it's probably old enough that no database could support what they needed, could be wrong on that one, but it was my best guess.
139 comments and no one addresses his use of a slur.
Because that's really just to be expected at this point, and what his audience would want..
Better to focus on constantly poking at him for being dumb, which he and his fans hate, rather than give them what they want, ie being upset at their hateful language
it seems that nobody really cares about the word retard anymore, it's quite funny how it went from super common language, to being less common, to people just saying it again now.
I'm curious how many people actually consider the word a slur, and how many people even care these days.
Frankly the whole exchange sounds like Hollywood tech jargon.vaguely relevant words used in a not quite sensible way....
Clearly the solution is to just use a big Excel spreadsheet.
In our company I’m friends with one of the lead devs. He once told me “no matter what way you look at it, excel is never the answer” lol I’m sure he was a bit biased, but I’ve seen my fair share of macro-ridden abominations over the years
Excel is accounting workbook software, it is not suitable for data storage. Although people certainly use it that way.
It's an amazing tool if only one person is updating / maintaining the file. The moment collaboration starts, you're all fucked. I'm currently maintaining one that I inherited that is at least 10 years old and comes with a 50 page instruction manual on how to run it every month... that then gets posted to a shared drive where anyone can edit.
And then the rest of the month is spent explaining to the end users how they fucked it up this time.
On the flip side, I've also built sheets that could parse data between Nav, MySQL, and SQL ERP systems with tables of over 5million rows each on a single button refresh that ran flawlessly for years... because I was the only maintainer and the sheets were locked from accepting changes from other users.
It makes a pretty good calculator. 🧮
TL;DR de-deuplication in that form is used to refer a technique where you reference two different pieces of data in the file system, with one single piece of data on the drive, the intention being to optimize file storage size, and minimize fragmentation.
You can imagine this would be very useful when taking backups for instance, we call this a "Copy on Write" approach, since generally it works by copying the existing file to a second reference point, where you can then add an edit on top of the original file, while retaining 100% of the original file size, and both copies of the file (its more complicated than this obviously, but you get the idea)
now just to be clear, if you did implement this into a DB, which you could do fairly trivially, this would change nothing about how the DB operates, it wouldn't remove "duplicates" it would only coalesce duplicate data into one single tree to optimize disk usage. I have no clue what elon thinks it does.
The problem here, as a non programmer, is that i don't understand why you would ever de-duplicate a database. Maybe there's a reason to do it, but i genuinely cannot think of a single instance where you would want to delete one entry, and replace it with a reference to another, or what elon is implying here (remove "duplicate" entries, however that's supposed to work)
Elon doesn't know what "de-duplication" is, and i don't know why you would ever want that in a DB, seems like a really good way to explode everything,
Well, there's not always a benefit to keeping historical data. Sometimes you only want the most up-to-date information in a particular table or database, so you'd just update the row (replace). It depends on the use case of a given table.
Elon believes that each row in a table should be unique based on the SSN only, so a given SSN should appear only once with the person's name and details on it. Yes, it's an extremely dumb idea, but he's a famously stupid person.
Ssn being unique isnt a dumb idea, its a very smart idea, but due to the us ssn format its impossible to do. Hence to implement the idea you need to change the ssn format so it is unique before then.
Also, elons remark is stupid as is. Im sure the row has a unique id, even if its just a rowid column.
even then, i wonder if there's some sort of "row hash function" that takes a hash of all the data in a single entry, and generates a universally unique hash of that entry, as a form of "global id"
in this case you would just overwrite the existing row, you wouldn't use de-duplication because it would do the opposite of what you wanted in that case. Maybe even use historical backups or CoW to retain that kind of data.
and naturally, he doesn't know what the term "de-duplication" means. Definitionally, the actual identity of the person MUST be unique, otherwise you're going to somehow return two rows, when you call one, which is functionally impossible given how a DB is designed.
... That's what I said, you'd just update the row, i.e. replace the existing data, i.e. overwrite what's already there
... I don't think you understand how modern databases are designed
u were talking about not keeping historical data, which is one of the proposed reasons you would have "duplicate" entries, i was just clarifying that.
it's my understanding that when it comes to storing data that it shouldn't be possible to have two independent stores of the exact same thing, in two separate places, you could have duplicate data entries, but that's irrelevant to the discussion of de-duplication aside from data consolidation. Which i don't imagine is an intended usecase for a DB. Considering that you literally already have one identical entry. Of course you could simply make it non identical, that goes without saying.
Also, we're talking about the DB used for the social security database, not fucking tigerbeetle.
Might seem like a stupid question, but I'm in nostupidquestions sooo... Did Elon really do this tweet with the word "retard" in it? Obviously am on Lemmy so don't use Twitter.
Yep, just another example of what a trash human being he is.
Wow, that's fucked.
I saw a comment about this in the last couple of days that was really interesting and educational. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it again to link it, but the gist of it was that there would be two things wrong with using SSNs as primary keys in a SQL database:
Using SSNs as keys would violate both.
I went looking for best practices regarding SQL primary keys and found this really interesting post and discussion on Stack Overflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/337503/whats-the-best-practice-for-primary-keys-in-tables
My first thought was that people's SSNs can and do change, and sometimes (rarely?) people may have more than one SSN. Like someone mentions in that link, human error would be another reason why you would not want to use external data and particularly SSNs as primary keys.
It may be bad practice to use SSN as a primary key, but that won't deter thousands of companies from doing exactly that.
Oh, I hear you!
From what I'm seeing in other comments, it seems SSNs aren't used as primary keys, but they are part of generating the primary key. I haven't seen anyone directly say it, but it sounds like the primary key is a hash of SSN + DOB (I hope with more data to add entropy, because thats still a tiny bit of data to build a rainbow table from).
Still, assuming we haven't begun re-using SSNs, it seems concerning to me that a SSN is appearing multiple times in the database. It seems a safe assumption that the uniqueness of a SSN should make the resultant hash unique, so a SSN appearing as associated to multiple primary keys should be a concern, right?
Other comments have led me to believe the "duplicate SSNs" are probably appearing in "different fields" (e.g. a dead man's SSN would appear directly associated to him, but also as a sort of "collecting payments from" entry in his living wife's entry). That would a misrepresentation of the facts (which we know Vice Bro, Elon Musk the Wise and Honest would never do). Occam's Razor though has me leaning in that direction.
I think the thing that's catching you up the most is that you're assuming Elon has the slightest clue what he's talking about about. In your mind, you've read the words "the social security database" from his post and have made assumptions about what that means.
I've worked with databases for 20+ years, several of those being years working on federal government systems. Each agency has dozens or possibly hundreds of databases all used for different purposes. Saying "the social security database" is so fucking general that it's basically nonsensical. It'd be like saying "Ford's car database".
Elon clearly heard someone technical talking about something, then misinterpreted it for his own purposes to justify what he is doing by destroying our government institutions. His follow up of saying the government doesn't use SQL just reinforces that point.
Trying to logically backtrack into what he actually meant - and what the primary keys should be - is just sane washing an insane statement.
That all makes sense, except if someone's SSN changes (which happens under certain circumstances), doesn't that invalidate their primary key or require a much more complicated operation of issuing a new record and relinking all the existing relationships?
I can imagine an SSN existing in more than one primary key due to errors. If they use SSNs in the primary key at all, but combined with something else, that leads me to believe that the designers felt that SSNs were reliable for being a pure primary key.
I agree with you about Occam's Razor. The guy has demonstrated multiple times that he's a dishonest moron.
I'm not familiar with cases where someone's SSN could change. Could you link to resources on when that would happen?
I don't have any resources handy, but I do know someone who this happened to: they were an immigrant who got an SSN the first time they migrated to the US, went back to live in their country for a number of years, then returned to the US and I guess applied for an SSN again. Voilá, two SSNs and a mess.
Yeah, I can imagine thats be an administrative headache. I do not envy them the opportunity of sorting that out.
Thanks for the example though. That makes sense.
I don't envy either party either. You're welcome!
Yes, in the case of duplicate SSN assignments for two people (rare) l you would need to change their records to align with the new SSN while not changing the records that go the the person who keeps the SSN. We do it with state identifiers and it is a gigantic pain in the ass.
If two numbers are assigned to the same person merging them to one of the two is far easier.
I can definitely imagine all that. Thanks!
Musk is the walking Dunning-Krueger, he is too stupid to realize how terrible he sounds.
That dipshit does not even know how his dear friend at Oracle made tons of money in the past decades.
Billionaires are stealing our dollars, tax or otherwise.
It doesn’t matter anymore to the trumpers. They are eating this shit up like it’s thanksgiving
If there are timestamped records for things like name changes then you'd get "duped" SSNs
TIL Elon doesn't know SQL or have any basic human decency.
J/K, I already knew he doesn't have basic human decency.
If he knew anything about SQL, he could have run a quick search to see whether any SSNs are actually duplicated. (spoiler alert: they're not, he's just stupid).
I mean suggesting the government doesn't use SQL, in tech-speak is about as dumb as saying the government doesn't use numbers.
Government is full of what are known as relational databases as you are well aware, and though it stands to reason that they aren't all using the same software to manage it, many can be accessed using a standard language of commands. It could be a Microsoft Access, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Derby, Microsoft SQL server, PostgresQL, SQLite, SAP HANA, so on and so forth. That language is Structured Query Language (SQL).
And saying there can be multiple entries in a database for one item with respect to the Social Security Database is, to me, a silly distraction and spreading BS FUD to ignorant people. As others have already mentioned, most databases have an internal sequence (keyID) number that is unrelated to the personal ID number of the person whose data is collected.
He could also refer to the mere possibility of having duplicates which does not mean there are duplicates. And even then it could be by accident. Of course db design could prevent this. But I guess he is inflating the importance of this issue.
He's just a permanent petulant child.
Hanlon’s razor. He’s obviously referring to himself lol.